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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Caps on high skill immigrant workers might be worth the tradeoffs, but I think we as a society should acknowledge they are serious tradeoffs.

Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year. If companies in (or investing in) our country are so productive and there's enough market demand that they want to do creation over Y, then limiting access to talent over X puts a cap on growth.

Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.

As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw. It's the same way that dating apps like Tinder are mostly used by the unpleasant and unwanted, the good ones are already picked through. Of course just like the apps there's often some amount of pickings but they're limited and get scooped up quick of course and we're still overall limited to Y production. Even during periods of layoffs, companies don't tend to fire their best talent, they fire the weaker ones so even picking through those is still trying to find a diamond in the rough.

Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth, and we're willing to sacrifice efficiency in key industries for it. And maybe it's worth it if we put hard limits on economic growth and only allow Y production no matter how much market demand exists. Maybe it's worth it in the same way that some leftists felt promoting some minorities above their skill level was worth it.

But that's a discussion with some hard tradeoffs is it not?

I work in public accounting. You do not need to be particularly smart to work in accounting. You need a college degree, about a ~105 IQ, and an okay work ethic to be a good employee. Every firm I’ve worked at big and small has tons of H1B employees because you can underpay them (as in like $50k for an entry level vs. $65k for an American in the same position), promote them slower, and not worry about making them a partner one day. What benefit does this bring to the country? It’s laughable to call a 23 year old doing outsourced bookkeeping for some guy’s plumbing business “high-skilled” in any meaningful sense. It’s absolutely grating hearing people claim the US economy relies on these “high-skill” workers as if the majority of them are doing groundbreaking technical research. Accounting is a perfect career path for our replacement-level college grads who just want a safe, steady job. But nobody is majoring in it anymore since the pay sucks and the hours are terrible because firms can just hire indentured servants to fill any labor shortages. If we just made the H1B system conditional on paying the employee $250k we’d get all of the benefits of the actual high-skill immigrants and not the army of Indians undercutting everyone who just wants a normal boring office job.

That sounds great -- but it's not an argument for throwing all the H1Bs out. Make it $250K and it returns to being a truly high-skilled program.

All in all it's a M&B -- the motte is "the H1B salary floor is too low and it's not skilled enough", the bailey is "immigration bad".

I don’t think it’s a Motte and Bailey. Maybe some people on Twitter are claiming every last immigrant needs to be deported but even that is hyperbole. People wouldn’t care if it was just cutting edge STEM researchers, renowned surgeons, etc. But instead what is happening is that entire towns are being overrun by Indians making $120k working in IT at a bank or something, plus their parents that they bring over and their citizen children. I guess an economist would say this is good, they’re net taxpayers and not criminals, but I don’t see how this materially benefits the nation like they’re working on the Manhattan project or founding Nvidia or whatever. It just feels like additional competition for the ~1 SD above the mean citizen who makes up the bulk of the mid-middle to upper-middle class of the country for some marginal positive effect on the government’s balance sheet, plus all the more qualitative negative effects of increased diversity.

Very few people are arguing you shouldn't be able to import Alfred Einstein but it's also inherent to the system that whatever cutoff line you originally use to define unique genius is going to get eroded over time as business & humanitarian cases pile up. Plus people outside the country learn to adapt their individual cases to better resemble the Diagnostic criteria.

Agreed. From an engineer's perspective: it's clearly a wage suppression scheme. This is a trick to push down the middle class.

It’s absolutely grating hearing people claim the US economy relies on these “high-skill” workers as if the majority of them are doing groundbreaking technical research.

I mean the issue is that we're not selecting very hard for actual high skill / rare skill people.

If we just made the H1B system conditional on paying the employee $250k we’d get all of the benefits of the actual high-skill immigrants and not the army of Indians undercutting everyone who just wants a normal boring office job.

Yeah this seems like a good policy decision and I expect it doesn't happen because of specific lobbying to prevent it, not because it's unpopular with voters.

I mean the issue is that we're not selecting very hard for actual high skill / rare skill people.

As a one-time applicant, H1B kind of seems to anti-select for high skill a bit. If you have legible skills in demand (like when I had lucked on a momentarily hot PhD topic), you probably have other options too, and are less likely to keep taking a stab at a vaguely demeaning 1/5 hit rate lottery with 1 year between draws, a ridiculous stack of paperwork to get that lottery ticket, and a delay of months to even find out if you got the short straw. I did one attempt at H1B, didn't win the lottery, then the firm trying to hire me wanted me to go for O-1 next which had its own set of offputting hoops to jump through; and rather than stay more months in a bureaucratic limbo working from the wrong time-zone, I ended up signing on at a local subsidiary of an US bigcorp instead.

In this European office, taxes are higher, salary maybe has a bit of a cut vs. California, and climate is worse, but OTOH there is more vacation and no 60h work week hustle, cost of living is modest, I'm way in top 1% of the country's income stats, and would likely feel less well off at SV. If I was dead set on maximum earnings, my first pick now would be to try and finesse a transfer to Zurich where in turn I'd make more after taxes than US. Some friends in my techy bubble did manage to migrate to the States, at least one via O-1 and one via some roundabout route of being a postdoc researcher first. They've expressed envy that my office's mostly Europeans instead of mostly Asians that are 90% of the workforce over there.

OTOH if H1B is your one great shot at exiting a drab developing country, you're probably way more likely to keep plugging at the lottery year after year and finally make it through.